Formal Modeling of Embedded Systems with Explicit Schedules and Routes

Chapter 2A main goal of compilation is to efficiently map application programs onto architectural execution platforms, while hiding the details of the latter to the programmer through high-level programming languages. Of course this is only feasible inside a certain range of constructs, and the judicious design of sequential programming languages and computer architectures that match one another has been a decadeslong process. Now the advent of multicore processors brings radical changes to this topic, bringing forth concurrency as a key element in efficiency, both for application design and architecture computing power. The shift is mostly prompted by technological factors, namely the ability to cram several processors on a single chip, and the diminishing gains of Instruction Level Parallelism techniques used in former architectures. Still, the definition of high-level programming (and more generally, application design) formalisms matching the new era is a largely unsolved issue